Final Thoughts & Conclusion

Billed as a single-card 4K solution, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition easily supplied good playable frame rates at 4K UHD resolution at max settings. And this is mostly without all of the upcoming goodies like the AI-powered, performance boosting DLSS version of Anti-aliasing. While we couldn’t test real-time ray-tracing just yet in any meaningful way, Turing delivered on every other promise Nvidia made, AND with immature pre-launch drivers that will only get better with time.

New technologies take time to filter down into games and to be properly taken advantage of, but the previews and demo’s we had the opportunity to test look quite promising. Ray Tracing is going to provide a new level of realism and immersion. Deep-Learning Super-Sampling can either provide a higher quality of gaming at the same frame rates or provide a much higher frame rate at the same level of detail. While this sounds great on paper as an either/or, it can do a bit of both. It has the ability to bring playable frame rates to higher resolutions too, something we tested quite a bit at 4K UHD.

The $800 street price of the Founders Edition will make some cringe due to the significant jump in price from ‘80’ to ‘80’ series launch price, but it isn’t far from the 1080Ti that it often competes with. The RTX 2080 is new and immature compared to the GTX1080 and 1080Ti it will be replaced at around the same cost. Once the new technologies are more widely taken advantage of and drivers mature over the next several months, it’s easy to see the RTX 2080 pull a good gap between it and the Pascal cards. If you currently have a 1080Ti, it’s probably not worth the jump just yet, but if you have anything lower or older and are itching for an upgrade, this is more than a worthy choice.